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During our recent Oracle upgrade we encountered a lovely little bug.  This was a particularly annoying bug as it was not publicly acknowledged, nor was a patch publicly available.

The bug is apparently specific to deployments of Clusterware from release 2 of 10G database server on EMC storage devices, or devices that use the EMC powerpath software for multi-channel communication with the disk device.

Clusterware is very touchy during installation, and if anything is not 100% right it complains and dies.  On a brand new storage device, using brand new disks with brand new partitioning on them we were unable to complete the installation without help from Oracle support.

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At work we run a dotNet web application over an Oracle Database for our Central Reservations system. When we launched the site we launched the database on a dual 2.4Ghz Xeon system with 6 internal hard drives and 4Gb of RAM.

A little background on the system. The new dotNet application was written to replace an aging and poorly written cold fusion CMS, an equally aged and similarly bad vb6 application.

On top of replacing these applications, were a host of enhancements and new features that could not be done in the old systems.

At first things went really smoothly. The system was humming along, which considering it was an un monitored, unadministered Oracle server was pretty good.

It wasn’t long before the box began to suffer.

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It’s been a couple of months since my last update and a lot of things have happened in the intervening time.

At work we’ve had an Oracle Upgrade, a complete network restructure and an office move for the IS and Finance departments.

At home, we’ve had births, a death, big decisions, big-ish purchases and a couple of upgrades.

I hope to expand on some of these over the next few days, but for now just wanted to get my thoughts down so that i know what I still need to divulge.